Dark days for data privacy, protecting data gets hands-on

Another week, another disturbing government data surveillance initiative revealed. This time: The Brit’s GCHQ peeping Yahoo web cam chats. The mission was to collect and store facial images — indiscriminately — to be used later when looking for bad guys. Sometimes they got faces, sometimes they got an eyeful they didn’t bargain for. (Indeed, disturbing on a new and different level.) Yahoo is “furious,” and one can easily imagine their web cam users are well beyond such relatively quaint expressions of emotion.

As it happens, this week also saw some high profile bids to respond to data privacy concerns in the form of new smartphones: Black and Blackphone. The former is aimed at business users, the latter at the average consumer (who happens to care a lot about privacy). Blackphone’s big privacy selling point is that communications are automatically encrypted. Black, produced by Boeing, well, essentially if someone messes with it, it self destructs.  Not a massive, market flooding of products, sure, but I get the feeling it’s a harbinger of things to come.

So CIOs should take note, as much as the average Joe doesn’t seem to mind giving away his personal info, he expects you to protect it. For those IT leaders who haven’t already — and the trend is picking up — it’s time to think about taking responsibility for data protection to a hands-on level.

Also in Searchlight this week: What it doesn’t take to work at Google, a scary new virus (oh great!), and more!

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